Saturday, December 22, 2012

David Brooks has Reasons That Reason Cannot Know

The word processing macro that extrudes David Brook's "New York Times" column twice a week has once again scanned Google News for ("Find; Republican; Clusterfuck; "Recent") and pasted a sampling of the results into the same column-template it always uses.

The result?

One more Very Serious and Sensible assay of the political system of a completely fictional America where the GOP is not a raving dung-heap of plutocrats, bigots, paranoid imbeciles, Randites and fundamentalists.

If the two parties just knew a little more about each other we might have a deal on the “fiscal cliff” already...

which is why there is no reason to deconstruct it as a column-qua-column in any depth at all.

Regular readers are already familiar with my firm belief that Mr. Brooks long ago gave up on producing anything resembling traditional opinion-editorials such as your mom or grandpa might have recognized. Instead, for reasons that remain carefully hidden from we smelly rabble, the "New York Times" pays Mr. Brooks enormous sums of money to use his word processing macro to generate individual, 800-word chapters of a serialized Alt History/SF novel disguised as op-ed pieces ("The Whig Fan Fiction of David Brooks".)

This novel-in-progress tediously recounts the events taking place within a fictional modern America in which the GOP never had a Southern Strategy, Reagan never got elected by running deliberately racist campaigns, Jerry Falwell never existed and Rush Limbaugh is merely a minor, fringe kook who no one ever listens to.

In fact, the most implacable antagonist to be found in Mr. Brooks' magnum crapus is not anywhere on the Right at all, but instead takes the malefic form of the Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock. The Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock is forever busy corrupting Real America with its welfare programs, contempt for rural values and bad sexy sex stuff. Time and again Mr, Brooks slips on his CSI togs, carefully scrutinize scenes of obvious depravity or indifference by the rich and powerful only to come away convinced that he had found the true perpetrator in the phantom footprint of a Dirty Hippie Birkenstock or the imaginary whiff of Dirty Hippie patchouli.

In addition to being both ubiquitous and sly to the point of invisibility, the Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock is also immensely powerful, routinely terrifying the Democratic Party into refusing to do what Democrats in Mr. Brooks' America are supposed to do: capitulate gratefully to Republican demands. So vast is the reach of the Dirty Hippie Ghost of Woodstock that, time and again, otherwise Reasonable and Serious Democrats miss the opportunity to obey Republican directives for fear of offending it

Finally, in Mr. Brooks' fake history of American, you will find hovering above grubby fray a humble professor of Humility and heroof Reasonable Centrism named "David Brooks": a character whose most salient feature is never having said or written any of the things our David Brooks has said and written.

For example, here is Mr. Brooks today citing the Weekly Standard on how debilitating a "generation of debt politics" has been:

In other words, even if Obama gets a fiscal-cliff deal, he still needs to shake loose some money — either from the entitlement programs or from a new revenue stream — to pay for his programs. He is still caught in the remorseless vice that Christopher DeMuth describes in, “The Real Cliff,” a brilliant piece in The Weekly Standard. A generation of debt politics has left our leaders with no room to maneuver.

And here is the very same Mr. Brooks back when he worked at the very same Weekly Standard, mocking "Stupid Party" Democrats for their deep concern that Bush tax cuts would destroy the Clinton surplus and laughing at the idea that profligateRepublican fiscal policies could ever plunge the country back into the "remorseless vice" of Republican-created deficits:

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

...

Multiply this lie by a dozen dozen others at Mr. Brooks' career stands as one of the most remarkable acts of sustained, public fraud I have ever seen, and one which is kept from collapsing under the weight of its own absurdity entirely by money and by the willingness of Mr. Brooks' Beltway colleagues to go along with the scam.

It is also clearly part of Mr. Brooks' long-term project to gradually use the immense influence he wields to gradually eradicate the real modern history (a process about which I have written before ["Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and You"] because, as longtime readers know, I am a fucking pedant on the subject.)

And so, in lieu of another fisking of another lump of horrid Brooksian claptrap, instead -- for a little taste of how long my little one-man war on Mr. Brooks' Centrist bullshit has been going on -- here is a re-print of a post of mine fromthe pre-Photoshop days of my misspent blogger youth:

+ + + + + + + +

BoBo pleads for “compromise”. Again.

Just hold still and we’ll skin you with a better knife.

Short Brooks is Same-As-It-Ever-Was Brooks: Let’s cooperate. You bend over a trifle further and we’ll screw you a bit less brutally.

This from today’s NYT where, owing to forces that I find incomprehensible, David Brooks still draws a paycheck for tasks completely unrelated to filling the vending machines up with fresh cookies and HoHo’s at night. And, yes, I add in a word or two.

"Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it."

No you tube worm – the Senate is threatened by your party. By your extremists. By your lunatics. Every Party has its nutjobs, Brooksie, but not every Party hands them the keys to the vehicle and then points a webbed finger at the Other Party and shouts “J'Accuse!” you truckling little pecksniff.

Maybe you didn’t get the message, or maybe you think hawking the same, old GOP Thalidomide in a world populated by the offspring it helped cripple is still a successful marketing plan, so let me say this reeeeal slooow so that there’s no misunderstanding: Mixing carbolic acid and lemonade and selling it to children as a “compromise” is not a compromise: it’s settling for poisoning children at a slightly slower pace that you had hoped for.

Go peddle “capitulation to lunatics as a square deal” on eBay, ‘cause we ain’t buying any.

"When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate."

“The centrist majority?” Just like slavery was settled amicably by the Missouri Compromises II, III and IV?

Or was the Jim Crow Apartheid that rotted away in the Red States for a hundred years after the Civil War whisked away by a “series of state-by-state compromises” and I just didn’t notice? Segregation? The ban on interracial marriage? And the ban on teaching Evolution?

Transpose any other basic civil rights issue onto the template BoBo proposes as the reasonable alternative to Kwazy Judicial Activism and the texture and density of the shit that he is packed with jumps right out at you.

I dunno which is more amusing: the thought that BoBo actually believes the diarrhea the comes bubbling out of his pie-hole, or that he thinks people just don’t notice the Giant Fundy Dildo rammed so ballistically up his nether regions that its chubby head actually pops right out of his pie-hole like a Jack-Chick-in-the-Box and says "Howdy Cowboy".

A dildo – by the way – it would actually be illegal for BoBo to purchase in the fine state of Alabama. Thanks to their level-headed “ centrist majority.”

"Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation."

No they articulated a right to privacy (do you ever get a single thing right?) which is as implicit in every other right mentioned in the Constitution as is the right to breathe, which the Founders also did not specify, because I guess they never anticipated the existence of the New York Times, or that it would one day decide that a myopic Sugar Glider should have its own column.

Then there’s more Peevish White Noise strung together to form sentences. Phrases like “right and left” and “pro-life or pro-choice” and “tit-for-tat”: the “Tyranny of False Bisection.” Both sides -- the barking mad and the reasonable -- somehow both equally wrong. Idiot.

…

Every few years another civilizing custom is breached. Over the past four years Democrats have resorted to the filibuster again and again to prevent votes on judicial nominees they oppose. Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away.

In response, Republicans now threaten to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster on judicial nominees. That they have a right to do this is certain. That doing this would destroy the culture of the Senate and damage the cause of limited government is also certain.

..."

And again, BoBo fills up his incredibly pricey column inches with a lot of empty puling and cavorting and zero-sum-game masturbating on the glories to compromise and centrism…before he gets to the razor he has tried to hide in the candy bar.

BoBo, do you know what Centrism actually looks like? It looks remarkably like the Democratic Party with Bill Clinton in the White House. Center-right, to be accurate and y’all even got NAFTA, GAT, Welfare Reform and a bunch of other goodies from the Eternal Republican Wish List thrown in to the deal.

And as a big “Thank You”, you blocked 35% of his judicial nominees (a little statistic that Mr. Fair ‘n Balanced very conspicuously omitted because it made his whole thesis look like the puddle of damp excreta that it actually is), and are now raving that Dems blocking 4% is somehow an unprecedented breaching of “another civilizing custom”.

"The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better. "

“Fact is” you wormy little Quisling, the Dems spent the 90’s compromising their fool asses off – precisely like it says right here on the prescription that Dr. BoBo wrote out for us.

For their troubles they got Newt Gingrich and his GOPAC Little Red Hatespeech Book launching a carefully planned, deliberately executed verbal blitzkrieg again the Democratic Party. A coordinated national campaign of that came with a detailed list of words (Free In Every Box of Cracka’ Jacks!) to be used to demonization and humiliate Democrats at every opportunity.

For their troubles we get Tom DeLay rising like the Asshole Kraken from the absolute depths of bigoted-ignorant-demagogue-politics to become a proud leader of your party. And trailing behind him like the smelly brown tail of a feculent comet, all the rest of the escapees from “The Island of Doctor Moreau” that own and operate the GOP.

For their troubles they got the Democratic President of the United States hunted like a wild animal for seven years – for sport – by Republicans riding along on a rhetorical tsumani of Absolute Ethical Standards. Virtually shutting the country down to impeach him for a b-l-o-w-j-o-b, not because you wanted to -- Heavens No! -- but because any hint of impropriety on the part of any president need to be ferreted out, no matter the cost.

Well the per-capita number of Ferrets in your party has certainly skyrocketed since then, so where are all the investigations of the possible High Crimes and Misdemeanors of the administration of George Walker Bush? Where are the Select Committees? The Special Prosecutors with unlimited lines of credit? Has Cheney been excoriated and rebuked for secretly rigging up a new energy policy? Has GW been subpoenaed yet? Has Rice? Perle?

Of course not, BoBo, because your party is infested top to bottom with CHUDS and poltroons, liars and hypocrites, Elmer Gantrys and Jeff Gannons. You already own the Executive and Legislative branches and the only thing standing between them and the Jesusland, Inc. fantasy that you all cream over is the courts…

…so let’s expend a Brooksie columns beating up on judges by cowardly proxy. Hey, how about Liberal Supreme Court Judges? Who are dead? And how about we try to throw the dogs off the scent by waving the word “Abortion” around and seeing if that’ll confuse them.

Face it, BoBo in the sharp illumination of your party’s own words and deeds, you sound idiotic, but hey, if you really want to disarm and play nice, fine. And since we spent a decade trying to find compromise with the "Napalm a Progressive for Christ" wing of your party (now better known now simple as The Republicans) and got our skulls bashed in with big, old GOP crowbars for our trouble, how about you going first, and we’ll meet you at the half-way point.

The REAL halfway point, which at the rate your party has being sprinting into the doughy arms of the Fundamentalists, is now about nine billion miles to your left.

About a commercial on MTV, back in ancient days when they played music, about gun laws, shortly after the mayor of Atlanta pushed a law banning "penetrative sex toys". It was very simple, yet effective.

Mike.K.

It had a young man standing in a vacant lot outside the city. He had a wicked looking assault rifle in one hand and a ginormous dildo in the other. He simply said, "One of these is legal to buy in Atlanta city limits. One is not. Can you guess which one?"